Police and Crime: Evidence from Dictated Delays in Centralized Police Hiring

Paolo Buonanno and Giovanni Mastrobuoni ()

No 6477, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper exploits dictated delays in local police hiring by a centralized national authority to break the simultaneity between police and crime. In Italy police officers can only be hired through lengthy national public contests which the Parliament, the President, and the Court of Auditors need to approve. Typically it takes three years before the requested police officers are recruited and become operational. We show that this endogeneity vanishes once, controlling for countrywide year effects, we use positive changes in the number of police officers. The availability of data on two police forces, specialized in fighting different crimes, provides convincing counterfactual evidence on the robustness of our results. Despite the inefficient hiring system, regular Italian police forces seem to be as efficient in fighting crimes as the US ones, with two notable exceptions: auto thefts and burglaries.

Keywords: police; crime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H7 H72 H76 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2012-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6477.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Police and Crime: Evidence from Dictated Delays in Centralized Police Hiring (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6477

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().